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De­vialet’s Di­a­log adap­tor can cre­ate a mul­ti­room speaker sys­tem made of up to 24 Phan­toms

De­vialet Gold Phan­tom £2,190 en.de­vialet.com

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De­vialet is go­ing for gold with the lat­est ver­sion of its

Phan­tom speaker. It launched its Phan­tom and Sil­ver Phan­tom speak­ers last year, priced at £1,390 and £1,690 re­spec­tively, and has now added the top-of-the-range Gold Phan­tom for £2,190. That’s se­ri­ously ex­pen­sive, of course, but the Gold Phan­tom is un­like any of the com­pact home speak­ers we’ve seen in the past.

The speaker starts off with 22-carat tinted gold pan­els that will be a great match for your Rose Gold iPhone, iPad or Mac­Book. Be­neath its gilded ex­te­rior, the Gold Phan­tom boosts its vol­ume lev­els to a thun­der­ous 108dB – about the same level as a pneu­matic drill. It’s not just about power, though. The Gold Phan­tom sounds ter­rific too, thanks to a cus­tom-de­signed au­dio chip that in­cludes both a high-qual­ity DAC (dig­i­tal-to-ana­logue con­verter) and a hy­brid ana­logue/dig­i­tal am­pli­fier. There’s no sub­woofer, but De­vialet came up with a spe­cial de­sign for the bass driv­ers that al­lows them to with­stand very high air pres­sure in or­der to en­hance bass out­put. In fact, De­vialet refers to this as its ‘bass im­plo­sion’ de­sign, as some of De­vialet’s early pro­to­types im­ploded un­der the pres­sure they were sub­jected to.

Man­i­festly mas­sive sound

All three Phan­tom mod­els in­clude Blue­tooth and dual-band Wi-Fi for stream­ing mu­sic, as well as Gi­ga­bit Eth­er­net and a Toslink op­ti­cal con­nec­tor. The Gold Phan­tom adds Ap­ple’s Air­Play tech for stream­ing from Macs and iOS over Wi-Fi. De­vialet also pro­vides its own app, called Spark, which lets sev­eral peo­ple share their mu­sic li­braries and cre­ate shared playlists.

If you buy two Phan­toms to­gether you’ll save a cou­ple of hun­dred pounds and get De­vialet’s Di­a­log adap­tor thrown in, which pairs the speak­ers for two-chan­nel stereo. And, if you’re se­ri­ously loaded, it can cre­ate a mul­ti­room sys­tem of up to 24 Phan­toms spread through the wings of your man­sion.

The tint of the Gold Phan­tom goes great with Ap­ple’s Rose Gold Macs and iOS de­vices.